Teaching Method

ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

2nd Grade
Lauren Phillips

“I asked, ‘Do you think when we want our way, we can get hard as a rock, and feel nothing is going to change us?’ ‘Yes!’ Lilly said. She began to take part [in the lesson] seriously.” Ms. Phillips also taught about the way geology and reading have something important in common. One result, she writes, is: “Claire…changed dramatically….Her reading improved 4 levels.”

3rd Grade
Barbara McClung

How hard and soft can be beautifully together in rocks; how a marine mollusc needs a creature very different from itself; and what we can learn about ourselves from both. This article is titled “Learning vs. Prejudice!”

4th Grade
Helena Gvili

Ms. Gvili writes about this “science lesson I taught on light and color….[It] enabled my 3rd grade students, who had been angry and failing, to see that the world they were confused by has a sensible, wonderful structure: it puts opposites together, such as hidden and shown, many and one.” Published in The Deming Headlight (Deming, New Mexico).

MIDDLE SCHOOL

8th Grade
Bénédicte Caneill

Taught by a teacher who at first saw “many bored looks.”— Her students learned how opposites like addition and subtraction are made one beautifully in the earth and are in themselves. “There has been a tremendous change….they were excited and able to remember facts, because they saw a deep relation to themselves.”

JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL BIOLOGY

7th Grade
Christopher Balchin

Children who made “fun of each others’ accents and skin colour” — came to “have a tremendous sense of fellow-feeling” and learned! Published in The Teacher, journal of the National Union of Teachers, United Kingdom.

Rosemary Plumstead

The chemical composition of our blood is like that of ancient seas–it is a oneness of past and present. Our erythrocytes (red blood) cells steadily are born and expire in our bodies, a oneness of stability and change.

Its structure is a oneness of power and delicacy; the heart beats powerfully yet contains delicate, transparent, tough valves. And the heart is a oneness of separation and junction: it has two separate circulatory systems, systemic and pulmonary, yet they join rhythmically and together supply blood to the whole body. Do we want, like the heart, ‘to have a good relation of being apart from and also joined to other people and things?’

“It is the grandeur of this method that through it not only do failing students succeed, but that students who seemed distressed, angry — even cruel — also change.”

HIGH SCHOOL ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE

Rosemary Plumstead

About regions, trees, symbiosis, & more, including the structure of a leaf.

Take, for example, the opposites of delicacy & strength in the way a leaf is made: “As I held up a large leaf, students commented on the size: “Wow! It’s so big!” “It’s very large, but do you think it’s delicate?” I asked.” Also see “A New Care for Knowledge and People” In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.